The latest results from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development were released by the SRCD today, in advance of their publication in Child Development later this week. The study has been tracking over 1,000 families since 1991 to measure the effects of various forms of childcare, parenting styles, and family situations on development and behavior.

It's an important study, but in the media coverage I've seen and heard today, it's been almost completely stripped of context and background. The result: childcare generally and day care in particular come off terribly, and parents who use childcare regularly--oh, about 81% of us by the time the kids are four and a half--come home feeling like crap.

Before quitting your job, firing the nanny, and storming the ramparts over the study's definition of father care as childcare instead of parenting, why not take a look at some key elements of the study that didn't get much play in today's SRCD-driven hypestorm?

Most kids get childcare by age 4.5 And by most, I mean, 64% of 1yo's, 71% of 2yo's, and 81% of 3yo's, get 10+ hours of childcare per week.

Whatever the impact of childcare, it's dwarfed by the impact of family situation and parenting style. The link between behavior and development/cognition and family features [e.g., routines, books, playthings, outings] and parenting style [e.g., mom-child interactions, positive responses, etc.] was 2-3x stronger than the link to childcare. Development's also strongly linked to parental education and family income.

Whatever the deal with dads being considered childcare providers, they're the most consistent providers until school-age. Several people have pointed out that it's lame of the researchers to classify dadcare as The Other, childcare, in the study. Here's how they describe the study's 1991 design in 2006:

When the Study began, the researchers did not all agree about which arrangements to include in the term "child care." Some felt that care by the father on a regular basis should be considered "child care" because that situation differed from one in which the mother had full-time care responsibility. Others argued that "child care" should include only care by people other than the parents.

Ultimately, the researchers decided to study all child care provided by someone other than the mother on a regualr basis...

I can see their point, but only to the extent that I could imagine how, in 1991, the idea of a dad as a primary caregiver on par with a mom would be considered outside the norm. And if you're designing a study, you want to identify and account for as many variables as you can and not muddy up your sample pool.

Still, it's interesting to see dads are the only group of carers whose involvement stays steady throughout all three pre-school phases [see above]. It's also worth noting that in 1991, in 13% of the study's 1,300 starting families, dads were providing 10+ hours/week of childcare.